Yesterday I attended a talk at the offices of Cambridge International Education, where the topic was one very close to my heart; what do we need to do to prepare our students for the rest of their lives when the world is changing rapidly? This is a much debated topic, and some argue that the schooling experience was designed for an industrial age, and is no longer appropriate for the information age we find ourselves in. Rather over-dramatic viral videos make it seem that everything will shortly be very different to what we know, and it’s right that we think about possibilities and opportunities.
It’s not hard to find over-inflated claims; the video above suggests (I quote) “The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students studying a 4 year technical degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study”. For me, this self-evidently ludicrous claim demonstrates more clearly than anything that we need to tread carefully here, and not be too quick to jump on any bandwagon. But there are some things to think about carefully here. I heard it said at CIE event that “these days students are hired for being the same, but promoted for being different”, and I thought there was, for better or worse, probably some truth to that; in fact, perhaps it’s been like that for a long time. There are things that we want all students to learn (many of which have, after all, been hard-won over the centuries) but we also want to produce individuals who understand (not just recall) facts, and who can solve new (not just familiar) problems; self-directed individuals, not automatons.
So we need to carefully consider the traditional and the new; and be sure that our students to learn to think as well as to know ‘a lot of stuff’. The French do this by requiring, in addition to whatever else they are studying, philosophy (which I define as the problems left over when the scientists, artists, historians, linguists, mathematicians and other ‘regulars’ have packed their bags and left with their issues) and it seems to light a fire in many students. We do it in different ways – we try to embed it in every lesson – but one acid test that I use is to look at what happens when we give the students who have been with us longest – grade 12 – an open-ended, conceptually complex question for which they have to shape their own, original answers, over an extended period – not in an exam – and for which they cannot look up expert opinion.
All grade 12 students finished just such a task just before Chinese New Year, and I have just read the results from my own two classes and I’d like to share a few essays with you. I appreciate they are not exactly light reading, but the combination of knowing how to write, and having something interesting to say (the latter something we all overlook too often, I believe) is little short of astonishing. So here are a few essays to look at – not the best, nor from the most obviously academically successful – but if you ever needed evidence that our students can think, and think very well, here it is. You’ll see a few different ideas here, and you’ll see the same question tackled in different, though equally sophisticated ways. This is so very far ahead of anything I could have written when I was a teenager, indeed perhaps even an undergraduate, and I am so proud of them. It’s the clear intellectual flexibility, the capacity to see different perspectives and the resourcefulness needed to shape, re-shape and create these that impresses me more than the ideas themselves. It’s work like this that leads me to believe our graduates will be more than capable of dealing with whatever new, different challenging situations they come across. What a great thought.
